Identifying Critical Success Factors for Efficient Consumer Response based on the Australian Experience

Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) is a grocery industry supply chain management strategy, making use of electronic commerce and other innovations, to make the industry more efficient internally and responsive to consumer needs. Despite the many potential benefits obtainable from ECR, several studies indicate that the diffusion of ECR has been slow in many regions. There are many factors to which this slow uptake may be attributed, one of which is dissatisfaction with the program. In this paper, we attempt to identify factors that affect satisfaction with ECR, which will, in turn, affect the diffusion of the program. Since it is difficult to find a single measure of ECR success, we argue that satisfaction with ECR can be used as a surrogate measure of success. For the purpose of this study, an ECR survey of the Australian grocery industry was re-analysed. The results of this study indicate that external factors such as the type and size of companies are independent of ECR satisfaction. However, a number of factors essentially internal to the company that affect ECR satisfaction were identified by analysing the differences between the ‘Satisfied’ group and ‘Not Satisfied’ group. As a conclusion, a number of determinants of success with the ECR program are presented. This study provides incremental understanding of the determinants of ECR success, based on the Australian experience.